As Lonely Planet announces severe staff cutbacks due to Covid-19, veteran guidebook author Joshua Samuel Brown writes about his experiences working for the company through two major shifts in management and suggests a potential way forward for the beloved travel publisher.
Reports are trickling in on the Coronavirus that’s shutting down China and threatening to be either the next black plague (death toll 50 million), the next Spanish Flu of 1918 (death toll also 50 million, only we had cameras and…
An early rejected story of mine concerning Beijing Starbucks in 2002 and having to listen to The Eagles on continual replay. Gonzo journalism at its finest!
On the subject of windsurfing in Taiwan, one of the strangest years of a life with no shortage of strange years was spent living on an archipelago called Penghu, halfway between Taiwan and China. It’s a remote, beautiful and extremely…
Author’s Note: Outside of my work for Beijing Scene in 1999, Memoirs of a Dog Meat Man was probably my first serious bit of journalism. The brief backstory is that in 1998 I was hired by a company called Cal…
“Calling into the ring…Joshua!” It’s a hot August night in Taipei, and I am about to be beaten up in public. Standing across the ring (if you can call a cement square taped on a cement barroom floor a ring) stands…
SEO-destroying, algorithm-annoying preamble: A lot of my stories have stories of their own. This one about Taiwanese Cuisine (chew on that, WordPress SEO monitor) has two or three, so…read on or not. One of the pleasures of establishing a long-term working relationship…
It’s five in the afternoon at Hsinchu’s Municipal Stadium, inside of which a crowd of about twelve hundred have gathered, their vibe rowdy, but polite. Welcome to the world of Mixed Martial Arts in Taiwan. Heavy Metal music blares over…
Nineteen tales ranging from new journalism to exotic hallucination. Click here for the Kindle Version (Amazon) Click Here for all other E-book formats. (Smashwords) How Not to Avoid Jet Lag Nineteen stories from the increasingly deranged mind of travel Writer Joshua Samuel Brown,…
